Brand Gnu day Gnutella's fast ascent in P2P offers insight
about future successes.
By Peter Rojas
From December 2000 issue

On March 14, an innocuous posting on a popular hackers' Web site ignited a
firestorm of programmer interest. The posting read: "Nullsoft just released an
open-source Napster clone. It does MP3s, movies, and any other format you could
want." A few months earlier, the new program, called
Gnutella , would have gone largely
unnoticed, but the David-and-Goliath battle taking place between the recording
industry and Napster , a company that
develops a program for swapping MP3 files, made the posting hot news.

Gnutella had very peculiar beginnings. After inventing the program,
Nullsoft's Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper
were forbidden by the company's corporate parent,
America Online , to do any further work on the project or even to speak to
the press about it. So Gnutella's development was then left to a loose amalgam
of programmers from all over the world. It's a model of development that is just
as anarchic as Gnutella's network. But the programmers have one unifying tenet:
a steadfast commitment to maintain the interoperability of all of the different
versions of the program.

Some believe this shared objective may be at risk. As this core group of
programmers works to introduce a next-generation protocol for Gnutella, many
within the programmer community are growing impatient. What's frustrating them
is the overall slow pace of development, which could lead to competing versions
of the software.

AMERICA OFFLINE

That day in March, thousands of programmers downloaded the software off the
Internet. Then AOL intervened. The company was concerned about Gnutella's
potential Napster-like legal liabilities, so it pulled the software out of
circulation. The move attracted even more attention to the new file-sharing
program. The idea was out; it was too late to stop Gnutella.

Bryan Mayland was one programmer who had downloaded the Gnutella software
code. But once he heard that AOL had pulled the plug, he locked himself in his
apartment and set to work on understanding the program. Two days later, Mr.
Mayland emerged with his own version of Gnutella.

He spread the word of his accomplishments on the Web. And he became the first
member of a growing worldwide community of programmers to have contributed to
the erratic development of Gnutella. They're a disparate group of overwhelmingly
young, highly independent male programmers and hackers who often have little
contact with one another.

Gnutella's developers are typically more interested in the technology itself
than using it to swap files illegally. William Wong, the inventor of a Gnutella
clone called Furi, admits that he isn't particularly interested in swapping
files and that he rarely uses his own program. He began working on a Gnutella
clone, he says, because he was upset that big money and politics in the form of
AOL was destroying a technology whose potential had not yet been demonstrated.

Although Gnutella is open-source software, its development doesn't follow the
open-source model. Open-source software development is normally overseen by a
person or a group that wields the ultimate authority over the direction the
software takes. In terms of Linux, Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the
open-source operating system, has this authority and guidance power.

Because of this lack of an overarching authority, programmers set up
Gnutella.wego.com, a central clearinghouse for all things related to Gnutella.
The portal -- operated by Gene Kan and Spencer Kimball, recent graduates of the
University of California at Berkeley, teenager Nathan Moinvaziri, and the IT
consultant Ian Hall-Beyer -- carries Gnutella-related news, has links to
downloads of the various versions of Gnutella, and operates a mailing list and
discussion forum for developers.

The source code for the original Gnutella program isn't available because of
AOL's actions, but the reverse engineered protocols for connecting and swapping
files are. These 100-plus versions of the protocol are essentially in the public
domain, meaning that anyone who wants to can write their own version of
Gnutella.

With the press invariably mentioning Gnutella in its coverage of Napster,
millions of new users have downloaded the software and logged on, placing a
strain on a network that isn't designed to process hundreds of thousands of
peer-to-peer requests for files. Gnutella.wego.com is spearheading the
development of next-generation Gnutella protocol, one that is expected to have
better search capabilities and more efficient file transfers, as well as to be
able to support more users at once.

PULP NONFICTION

A core group of programmers whose efforts are being coordinated by Sebastien
Lambla, an 18-year-old university student, are working on developing what will
become the next-generation protocol, to be known as the general purpose location
protocol, or gPulp. There are plans to establish a nonprofit organization to
lead development, but for the time being the project is organized into
committees, with each attacking different aspects of the protocol such as
anonymity, privacy, and routing.

Having a large pool of users means that Gnutella users are more likely to
find the files they want online. Anyone who develops a version that operates on
a different protocol will have a hard time convincing anyone to use it unless it
also attracts a critical mass of users, a chicken-and-egg quandary known as the
law of network effects. "As long as interoperability is preserved," contends Mr.
Kan, "it's not important what the developers do."

Mr. Lambla admits that progress is slow, but he feels that achieving
consensus among the community will result in a stronger protocol down the line,
rather than releasing one that is rushed and incomplete. Bringing all interested
parties into the process is certainly a risky tactical move. Since no one owns
the Gnutella protocol, there is nothing stopping another group from developing
its own next-generation protocol that would be incompatible with the existing
one.

Not everyone involved in the development of gPulp is convinced that Mr.
Lambla's approach is best, and some worry that it could backfire if it takes too
long to establish a new protocol. "There isn't enough will among the
participants to work together," says Ben Houston, a student at Carleton
University in Ottawa, who has been involved with the development process. "There
will be many new protocols fighting it out in the marketplace."

If that were to happen, it would be as if there were several competing
versions of the World Wide Web out there, a situation that these idealistic
young programmers are all eager to prevent. And while the stakes are high for
these programmers, they may even be greater for the panoply of startups that are
building commercial applications of Gnutella.